As well as the project involving badges at university, ongoing, another project involved looking at the use of badges in High School. For this, I am particularly grateful for the collaboration of Naomi Hennah, a teacher at Northampton School for Boys, who saw some of our chatter about badges and spotted the potential for their use in school. Naomi has also brought her interest and expertise about oracy to the project.

This trial went rather well (that was Naomi’s doing). She devised three activities, each one building on the previous, so that pupils could progressively develop their skills but also revisit ones that didn’t go well. We decided that the trial would be of interest to other teachers, and published it in Journal of Chemical Education. The article is freely available at: J. Chem. Educ., 2017, 94 (7), pp 844–848. Things got a bit crazy:

The article was awarded ACS Editors’ Choice. This is extremely unusual for an education paper; it means that out of all of the ACS journals, one article is selected every day to be freely available, recognising the broad interest and appeal of that article’s content. As well as the kudos (damn right we are proud!), it means that the article is open access.

Hits on the article were incredible, and it received over 1000 views in the first month. I think this reflects the popularity of the idea and potential of badges.

Most recently, the article was featured in July’s Chem Ed Xchange “Especially JCE”, detailing articles of interest to High School teachers. Hopefully this will bring the idea to a new audience of interested teachers.

Our paper on the project has now been published. This gives a good overall summary of the project, the rationale for the underpinning design and the analysis of the evaluation project. The paper is published in Chemistry Education Research and Practice, which is free to read (although you may need to register). The paper should be open access in the next few weeks (i.e. no registration necessary). Enjoy!

This week was D-Day…Week; we had our first years completing their lab skills lab. If you want to try what we did, I’ve linked everything below.

Each student had to:

prepare in advance for the lab by:

completing a pre-lab survey (this is for the associated research project)

watch the pre-lab videos;

complete the techniques in the lab while

being videoed on their phone for two techniques and

completing peer review forms for three techniques;

after the lab they had to

Upload their video to labs afterwards to a video sharing site;

Submit the video links for review.

Overall it seemed to go well. There’s quite a lot to unpack, and having spent every spare moment this week reviewing the titration videos, I haven’t much more energy to say a lot beyond that. But I can say while I was expecting chaos and to be running around the lab coralling students, it just ran like any other lab. Students had something to do. They did it.

Feedback takes two forms.

Students get feedback on their technique via the VLE. This involves watching their videos and giving individual feedback. It is very time consuming, but offers a very rare opportunity to provide specific technique feedback to students. I will be able to build up a good assessment checklist now having gone through lots of them, which is exactly what Marcy Towns said would happen when she described her own implementation.

Students also get feedback on their peer review forms. This gives them feedback on number of decimals recorded, calculations, and significant figures. It was done en masse using mail merge and some Excel formulae under the bonnet, which again means you can give some very individualized feedback, but this time quite easily. (Love mail merge!)

We are counting down now to our final days before our students complete their lab badges skills. Just over a week to go! To move things along, we have gotten the badge back from the designer and they look really great! I’m thinking of making these flyers to try to summarise to students what it is they are all about.

Over the summer we have been working on a lab skills badging project. Lots of detail is on this site, but briefly this is what it’s about:

Experimental skills are a crucial component of student laboratory learning, but we rarely assess them, or even check them, formally. For schools, there is a requirement to show that students are doing practical work.

By implementing a system whereby students review particular lab techniques in advance of labs, demonstrate them to a peer while being videod, reviews the technique with a peer using a checklist, and uploads the video for assessment, we intend that students will be able to learn and perform the technique to a high standard.

Looking for interested parties to trial it out

I am looking for school teachers who would like to try this method out. It can be used to document any lab technique or procedure you like. You don’t necessarily need an exemplar video, but a core requirement is that you want to document students laboratory work formally, and acknowledge achievement in this work by a digital badge. We will provide the means to offer the badge, and exemplar videos if you need them, assuming they are within our stock. Interested teachers will be responsible for local implementation and assessment of quality (i.e. making the call on whether a badge is issued).

Yes I need help with badge design

This will be part of a larger project and there will be some research on the value and impact of the digital badges, drawing from implementation case studies. This will be discussed with individuals, depending on their own local circumstances.

So if you are interested, let’s badge! You can contact me at: michael.seery@ed.ac.uk to follow up.